Sampling-Based Tabu Search Approach for Online Path Planning

Abstract Path planning in unknown environments is one of the most challenging research areas in robotics. In this class of path planning, the robot acquires the information from its sensory system. Sampling-based path planning is one of the famous approaches with low memory and computational requirements that has been studied by many researchers during the past few decades. We propose a sampling-based algorithm for path planning in unknown environments using Tabu search. The Tabu search component of our method guides the sampling to find the samples in the most promising areas and makes the sampling procedure more intelligent. The simulation results show the efficient performance of the proposed approach in different types of environments. We also compare the performance of the algorithm with some of the well-known path planning approaches, including Bug1, Bug2, SRT, potential fields and the visibility graph. Furthermore, two different sampling strategies were used in the sampling procedure, including uniform and Gaussian distributions.